


Lance Sucks At Pep Talks

by scifigeek14



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feelings, Gen, Insecurity, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Pre-Relationship, References to racism, Talking, asuming that along with being Galra keith is some kind of vaguely asian ethnicity, they got each other's backs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 01:49:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9526505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scifigeek14/pseuds/scifigeek14
Summary: Lance kind of sucks at pep talks, but he makes Keith feel better regardless.In which two paladins deal with a missing leader, insecurities, and a little bit of racism by having a feelings jam.





	

“Keith?” Lance called out with a timid knock on the metal door in front of him, “You in there, buddy?”

Keith hadn’t been in the kitchen, the control room, the training room, or any of the other handful of places he had looked for him and if he wasn’t holed up in his room angsting, then Lance was officially out of ideas and ready to consider the possibility that Keith had vanished into the same void as Shiro.  

Despite having been the one to knock, he was still startled when the door silently swooshed open in front of him. Keith looked tired. His skin looked pale, almost white, and his eyes looked heavy. His body was braced on one shoulder against the door frame like it was hard to even stand upright. Lance wondered if he’d been crying.

“What do you want, Lance?” Keith asked, his voice croaking and thick. He had either been crying or sleeping.

“I just wanted to check on you, or something?” He answered, sounding unsure himself, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Lance,” Keith huffed, crossing his arms, “Better without you here to annoy me.”

“Are you sure about that?” Lance pressed, undeterred by Keith standoffishness; he was used to it by now. Lance covered his hurt with jokes and laughter, Keith covered it by either being rude or completely silent and fuming alone. He was currently attempting to do both. “Can I come in and talk?”

“I don’t need a feelings talk, Lance.” Keith rolled his eyes and scoffed, blowing a stray strand of hair out of his mouth with a huff, so Lance tried a different tactic.

“Actually, I’m having a really hard time dealing with Shiro being gone and I’d just feel better if I wasn’t alone right now.” None of it was technically a lie. He would feel better if he wasn’t alone and if he had someone to talk to about it all. But, that wasn’t why he’d come to Keith. He’d come to Keith because he knew that Keith was likely having the hardest time, having known Shiro for longer, and that he shouldn’t be alone in this.

Keith’s scowl slowly softened as Lance played up the pouty lip and puppy eyes. Finally, he moved out of the way of the door and waved Lance inside before slumping down on to his bed. He propped his elbows on his knees and pressed the palms of his hands to his temples with a sigh. Lance let the door shut behind him and carefully sat down in the bed.

He wasn’t sure what subject to broach first. A part of him wanted to just reach out and wrap Keith up in a big ol’ hug. That’s what he would do with anyone else, even Shiro. If he ever saw Shiro again he was absolutely getting the biggest hug in the history of hugs. If he was braver he would have considered reaching out and putting a comforting hand on Keith’s arched back. He even got so far as to lift his hand before awkwardly putting it in his own lap.

“So….”He rocked a bit on the bed with nervous energy, “I heard that you and the Princess made up. That is, I heard she apologized for being stupid about the whole you being part Galra thing.” Lance could have smacked himself for bringing up the other shitty thing that had happened to Keith this week. But thankfully Keith just snorted ruefully and it actually got him to lift his head out of his hands.

“You suck at pep talks,” Keith informed him with a shadow of a smirk, “But, yeah, she apologized. She didn’t really need to though. I get it. The Galra wiped out everyone she knew and her whole planet with it. It… stung, but I was never really mad at her for being upset.”

“She was more than upset, though!” Lance argued, feeling defensive on Keith’s behalf, “The way she was looking at you, like you were gonna snap and kill us all or like you were some kind of monster. If we weren’t all in such intense pressure to stop Zarkon at the time, I swear, I was this close from telling her to get the hell over it and stop being so racist.”

“Prejudice,” Keith argued, “I’m pretty sure there is nothing Minority about the Galra.”

“Fine, Prejudice then,” Lance agreed with a snort, glad to see a little fire return to Keith’s eyes, “No one else is giving you any trouble, right?”

“Not really. Coran went out of his way to tell me that this ‘In no way changed the way he felt about me or my place on the team’,” Keith confided, complete with bad Coran impersonation that caused a short laugh from Lance in response, “Pidge had a ton of questions but I didn’t really have too many answers for her. Hunk was, I don’t know…”

“What happened with Hunk?” Lance exclaimed. He hadn’t expected Hunk to cause a problem. Hunk seemed so wholesome.

“He just,” Keith paused to laugh at the absurdity of it all, “We ran into a Galra on our mission and he asked me if we all knew each other.”

“Oh noooo,” Lance groaned, “Hunk, no.”

“Not like I’d never heard that one before,” Keith snorted with mild amusement. Lance had heard that one before too. On his first day at the Garrison someone had asked him if he knew the janitor, who was from Mexico and Lance was not, thank you very much. Lance had told him that he did and that if the guy bothered him again he was going to tell his janitorial staff friends to leave some literal shit in the guy’s room. That had shut him up.

“I’ll talk to him about it,” Lance promised, “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m not upset about it. Not really.”

“How are you dealing with all that, the Galra stuff?” Lance asked, turning and relaxing to lean against the head of the bed. Keith raised an eyebrow at how comfortable Lance was making himself in his bed, but didn’t comment. He turned to face Lance and crossed his legs on the bedspread. He picked at the edge of his fingerless glove with one hand and half shrugged.

“Nothing I can do about it. It’s a part of me, so I’ll just have to deal.”

“Having to deal and actually dealing are two different things, man.” Lance sat up again and, kicking off his shoes, tucked his legs under him. The shoes dropped to Keith’s floor with a pair of matching clunk sounds. Keith was looking down at his hands and seemed unbothered by the noise. “You can talk to me,” Lance promised, carefully reached out and patting Keith’s ankle.

“What if Shiro never comes back?” Keith hardly whispered, “What if we can’t find him or if he really is dead?”

“That’s not gonna happen. We’ll find him. I’m sure off it. I can feel it, just as sure as I can feel Blue purring in the back of my head.”

“I can hear Red, too.” A small smile returned to Keith’s face.

“Blue is worried about Shiro’s Lion. It must be hard to be separated from his Paladin after they just bonded.”

“How are we even going to form Voltron?”

“We’ll manage. We’ll figure it out,” Lance assured him.

“Shiro wanted me to…He said that if anything happened to him that I should lead Voltron.”

“No shit? Really? He said that!?” Lance gaped in shock. Gosh, way to pile on the pressure before vanishing, Shiro.

“I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I’m ready. And how could I leave Red? What if Shiro’s lion doesn’t accept me? What happens when we find Shiro?” Keith’s right hand started to tremble. Lance wasn’t even sure if Keith knew it was happening. “And how can I lead this team when I’m still not sure if everyone trusts me, and why should they? I mean, I can hardly even trust myself not to go flying off the handle.”

“Keith,” Lance tried to interrupt.

“I’m reckless and hot-headed and I make rash decisions, like bringing a freaking knife to a peace hearing! What is wrong with me!?”

“Keith!” Lance shifted his hand off Keith’s ankles and instead gripped Keith’s wrist, shifting his hand down as soon as Keith froze to cover his trembling hand and clasp it tight. “You need to calm down. Freaking out isn’t going to solve anything and it’s just going to make things harder for you. Shiro wouldn’t want to see you like this.”

Keith didn’t respond immediately, just stared at the place where Lance’s finger’s rested on the top of the fabric of his glove. With his head tilted down, his long hair blocked most of his face and Lance couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He was waiting for his hand to be removed and to be kicked out of the room completely. He wasn’t expecting to hear a small sniffle come from beyond the veil of hair.

“I miss him,” Keith admitted with a warble in his voice, “He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother. When the Kerberos mission went wrong and they said he was dead, I thought nothing could be worse than that. But this, this not knowing, the fact that I couldn’t do anything and I still can’t do anything, it’s so much worse.” Keith’s put his other hand down on top of Lance’s and slumped forward until his forehead pressing against Lance’s upper bicep was the only thing keeping him upright. “Lance, I don’t know what to do. Everything’s changed so much and I feel so lost. I don’t know what to do.”

Lance rubbed Keith’s back with his free hand and bent his neck to rest his chin on the top of Keith’s head. A week ago he wouldn’t have dared. Getting close to Keith was like petting a stray cat: far more likely to bite and hiss than purr. But if Keith was leaning into him for comfort, Lance wasn’t going to deny him the touch. Lance figured that, besides Shiro, there hadn’t likely been many people who had given Keith a proper hug. The poor guy was probably touch starved. He’d have to add “give Keith more hugs” to the list of things he needed to talk to Hunk about. Hunk gave the best hugs.

“It’s okay that you don’t know what to do. Heck, I never know what I’m doing!” He joked lightly and was gratified when he felt a small chuckle rumble through Keith’s frame. “You don’t have to figure it out all on your own. We’re a team, right? But you have to let us help.”

Keith nodded into his shoulder before sitting up a bit. He screwed up his face and freed one hand to swipe at his eyes. Lance thought it was way more adorable than it had any right to be. He looked younger, more vulnerable than Lance had ever remembered seeing him.

“You too,” He said after clearing his throat.

“What do you mean?” Lance asked, taken aback at the sudden reversal.

“You’re always acting the fool to cheer us up and offering us help, sometimes literally throwing yourself in the line of fire, and you never ask for anything back, at least, nothing serious. And I think it’s because you’ve got it in your head that you are somehow less deserving of it, that you’re worth less than the rest of us.”

“How- how do you know that?” Lance was stunned. It was like Keith had read his mind and pulled out the very thing that Lance had been worried over for the last few weeks. Heck, since this whole adventure had started. Or, maybe, since he’d been accepted to the garrison. It had all but been confirmed that he didn’t _really_ belong there when he’d been classed as a Cargo Pilot.

“Because the easiest way to piss you off was to call you ‘second rate’ or ‘cargo pilot’. I’m a jerk but I’m not stupid. But I never really meant any of it, you know that, right, Lance?” Keith’s hand’s tightened around Lance’s. “You’re a really good pilot, and not a bad shot with your bayard.”

Lance thought that Keith’s hesitant attempt at a supportive smile was the cutest thing he’d ever seen.

“Thanks, Keith,” Lance said, really meaning it, “That means a lot.”

“You could afford to brush up on your hand-to-hand, though.” Lance gasped.

“I’ll show you hand-to-hand!” Lance used their tangled fingers to tug Keith’s arm closer and throw him off balance, using his other arm to shove at his arm and topple him over on to the bed.

“Ah!” Keith exclaimed in surprised, trying to fight off Lance, “Lance! Stop! No!”

Lance crawled up over him and began a vicious tickle assault on Keith’s sides and stomach while using one hand to fend off Keith’s swatting arms. Keith, it turned out, was incredibly ticklish. He threw his head back against the pillows, laughing helplessly and squirming under Lance’s attack. He had dimples when he smiled, and Lance wondered how he’d never noticed that.

“Lance! Please!” Keith yelped out between laughs and Lance decided to take mercy on him. But _only_ because he actually said please. He relented his tickling and flopped down on top of Keith. The weight of his full body front flop caused Keith to let out a loud “oof” sound.

Lance expected Keith to complain, to tell him to get off him and leave him alone, but he just let him lay there as the tail end of his giggles trailed off into heavy breathing. Lance closed his eyes. He could hear Keith’s heartbeat.

“Feeling better?” Lance asked after they caught their breath.

It took Keith so long to respond that Lance thought for a second he might have fallen asleep. Lance was considering taking a nap himself. Keith was warm underneath him and his heartbeat and the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest was calming. He felt himself drifting when Keith finally spoke.

“Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

Hunk found them later when he came to tell Keith to come down for dinner and woke them both up. They made him promise not to tell Pidge.


End file.
